by Bob Bickford
“You don't want to do that, Nate. You don't want to say it or even think it.”
“The hell I don't,” I snarled. “Watch me. I'll take care of this myself.”
Something woke me up. I was stretched out uncomfortably on the living room sofa. I looked at the clock and wondered if it was ten past seven in the evening or the morning. The light outside the windows said it might be either. Whatever I had been dreaming about had left me with a sense of guilt as bad as the taste in my mouth. I wondered if I was drinking too much lately, and my parents or my ex-wife or the war had grown legs on a quarter-bottle of bourbon and come creeping back for a visit.
I sat up and rubbed my face. There was a knock on the front door. It was soft, tiny, and I almost didn't hear it at all. I crossed the room in my stocking feet.
Annie Kahlo stood waiting on the step, her head turned to watch the street. She wore something red-patterned and gauzy. Her hair was pulled back and covered by a scarf. Her profile was nearly severe, beautiful in the same way the old Egyptians had been beautiful. Nefertiti.
I had the absurd thought that I wouldn't much like to cross her if it came down to it.
She turned to look at me. Her eyes were dark, and said everything and nothing. I felt a stir of nerves.
“You were sleeping,” she said.
“A little bit,” I said, and didn't know how to take back the foolishness of it.
She looked behind her, back at the street.
“They're here now,” she said. “They've come back.”
“Who's come back, Annie?”
“Remember I told you that June was afraid of the Hespers? Now she's gone, and they've come for me. She can't protect me from them anymore.”
She extended an arm straight out and pointed up the street, without turning her head or taking her eyes from mine. The gesture was odd, but I leaned out past her to look. I saw the humped trunk of the old pre-war Nash parked against the curb about halfway up the block. It had rusted wheels and faded blue paint. I knew the car.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed.
I turned inside to get my shoes, and then as quickly turned back to pull Annie inside. She resisted, and I let her go. I was down the steps and striding across the lawn in my socks when I realized that my coat with the gun in the pocket was inside. I kept going. It seemed like a long walk to the Nash. I felt the scrape of cement under my soles and my own breathing, but not much else. I slowed and stopped in the middle of the street when I came abreast of the driver's window.
The red-faced driver looked at me without expression, his eyes slitted. His partner leaned forward and smiled at me. He looked like a rat. I took a deep breath. “I told you that I didn't want to see you two again,” I said. “I didn't want to see you anywhere at all, but the number one place I didn't want to see you was on this street.”
“So go look somewhere else, peeper,” the driver said. “Go find a place where you don't see us.” He stared out of the windshield and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, affecting boredom. The passenger door snicked open and the thin man got out and faced me over the top of the car. He held a revolver, and he rested it on the metal roof, aimed in my general direction. He kept smiling.
“You been around this town long enough you still ought not to need certain things explained,” he said. “But if you do, you're in luck. We're the guys they send out to do the explaining.”
The metal mechanism made a wet scrape as the thin man cocked the revolver. I had never much liked the sound of it. The gun still casually rested on the roof.
“You like to go places you ain't been invited to,” he went on. “You poke your nose in where it shouldn't be. You take up for broads have nothing to do with you.”
“Like Charlene Cleveland?” I asked. “Like her?”
The driver looked at me from the corner of his eye. I saw through the open window that he had also made a gun appear in his right hand. Everyone had one now, but me. I had come to this party under-dressed, and it was embarrassing.
“Like her,” he nodded. “More important, like the gash across the street over there.”
“The splat,” the thin man laughed. “Boss calls her 'the splat'. I like it.”
His shoulders shook, thinking about it. He didn’t look at me. If I'd had a gun, I might have shot them both right then, but I didn't, so I couldn't.
“Sometimes you give a guy a message and he gets it,” the driver said. “Sometimes he don't. Sometimes, it's like a dog. You can beat it as many times as you like, but if the message don't get through you have to take it out back and shoot it.”
“That your plan?” I asked. I figured it must be.
A horn tapped once from across the street, somewhere behind me. All three of us looked over. Down the line of parked cars, the door of a plain black Hudson opened and a man got out. He adjusted his hat deliberately before he walked over to stand beside me.
“Get back in the car,” he said pleasantly.
The thin guy swallowed and nodded. I saw that the guns had disappeared.
“Why don't you go back and sit on your porch and wait?” the man asked me, without taking his eyes from the Nash. It didn't sound like a suggestion. “I'll have a word here and then come to join you.”
I didn't see that I had better options, so I walked across the street. When I went up the porch steps, I saw Annie sitting on a glider at the end of the veranda. It had come with the house, and I had never sat in it. She had put her dark glasses on, and sat with her knees drawn up, hugging herself. She didn't say a word.
I parked a haunch on the railing and looked down the street at the old sedan. The third man bent over and looked into the driver's window.
“Cop,” I said to myself, since Annie wasn't talking. “Cop for sure.”
The man stepped back, away from the car, and its engine started up. He watched as it coughed blue smoke and rolled down the hill. It turned the corner at the bottom and disappeared. He slapped his palms together as though they were dusty, and started toward where we sat. He wore a brown suit with a vest. His yellow tie went well with the cocoa straw hat that shaded his eyes.
When he reached us, he put a foot on the bottom step and stood staring at me. His look wasn't challenging; it seemed more like he was memorizing my face. He gave a tiny nod, like a tic, and then looked over to where Annie sat on the glider. She hadn't moved. Behind her dark glasses, she stared straight ahead and didn't shift her head to look at him.
“Those men won't bother you anymore,” he said. “They were off the reservation, so to speak.”
His clothing was vivid, but the man himself looked curiously bleached. He had pale red hair, going gray, and faded blue eyes that bulged.
“They weren't bothering me,” I said. “I looked forward to talking to them some more.”
“Suit yourself,” he said.
I lit a cigarette to buy myself a minute. My mouth still tasted like metal, and the smoke was comforting.
“You going to show me your badge?” I asked.
“I don't think so,” he said.
“Got a name?”
“Name's Earnswood,” he said. “And you're Nathaniel Crowe. I already know so.”
“And you happened to be parked on our street at the same time as those guys? Just coincidence, or do you have an interest in a guy named Sal Cleveland? Those are his guys.”
He pursed his lips and thought about it. “I don't know anyone named Cleveland,” he said. “Whether or not we have the same interests, we'll see.”
He glanced at Annie again. She didn't return the look, and he shrugged and stepped off the porch. Halfway across the lawn, he turned back. “You said I was parked on your street. It isn't your street. All the streets in this town are my streets. You might want to remember that.”
I didn't answer him. As soon as he settled in his Hudson, he pulled it from the curb and gunned it. He didn't look over at us when he went by.
“He's a liar,” Annie said. “He's a policeman, an
d he's lying.”
She hadn't moved. I couldn't read her eyes behind the dark lenses. I went over to where she sat on one end of the glider and parked myself on the other. I wanted to touch her, but I didn't.
“You know him, Annie? What is it he's lying about?”
“He knew my father.”
Her voice was flat. She held herself very still. It worried me a little. “He was friends with Sal,” she said. “He used to come to the ranch. He was younger then, but I recognize him. He's the policeman.”
“He was at the ranch, together with Sal Cleveland?” I asked.
“He's one of the ones who killed my father. He's part of it.”
I lowered myself to sit on the porch floor in front of her. I took off her glasses as gently as I could, and set them on the seat beside her. I took both of her hands in both of mine and looked up at her face. “Annie, the police aren't even going to arrest Sal for killing his wife. They aren't interested in justice for something happened twenty-five years ago.”
Her almond-shaped eyes went wide. “I saw him do it,” she protested. “I was right there.”
“Even so.”
It relieved me that she didn't press for details. I didn't want to have to explain why the cops didn't want her testimony, or why they didn't trust her as a witness. I looked to shift the subject.
“I don't know,” she said slowly, “if you should get involved in all this. Maybe I'm asking for too much.”
“This is my battle, too,” I said. “I am involved. He shot my client. I forced him to give her a divorce. I showed him up, and he took it out on her. That's the truth of it.”
“It wasn't your fault,” she said. “She hired you to help her, and that's what you did. You helped her.”
“I think it's time you told me about the rest of it,” I said. “About Sal Cleveland, about this Earnswood fellow, about June and your father—all of it. About you.”
Her eyes looked raw. I saw the beginnings of tears.
“Tell me what happened to you,” I said. “Tell me, Annie.”
I pulled her down to me and held her while she cried. After a while, the shaking subsided, and when she spoke again her voice sounded different.
“My parents are from Hawaii,” she said. “They never should have come here. They didn't belong in this place. If they weren't from here, then neither am I.”
“Both of them were Hawaiian?” I said, surprised. “I knew that your mother was.”
“She was haole. Blonde hair and green eyes. She wasn't born there. She came from New York, and her family had money. She brought my father here, and she abandoned him here and went back. Left him...and us.”
A man and a woman passed by, walking some kind of a Boxer dog. The man glanced over and saw us. He gave a small nod. The dog nosed at the fallen walnuts on my lawn and decided against them. They went on by and out of sight.
“Our last name was Kahala,” she said. “He changed it to Kahlo because he thought it sounded American. It doesn't though, does it? Sound American?”
“I suppose not,” I said. “I thought your mother was the native islander. I suppose because she went back and your father stayed.”
“She was Hawaiian...here.” She touched her chest. “He was just lost. He bought the ranch with her money.”
“What was she like, your mother?”
“She was elegant. Even living on the ranch, she was perfect. She told Junie and me that nothing was ever an excuse for looking and acting like we'd fallen off a banana boat.”
She smiled a little at the memory.
“One morning, we woke up and she was gone. She left a note that said she would send for us. She never did, or if she did it came too late.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“I was sixteen,” she said. “June, only eight.”
“Too young,” I murmured, and her expression changed.
“How old is old enough to lose your mother?” she asked.
I nodded, conceding the point.
“My father wouldn't give up on raising his avocados, even if he had two girls to raise,” she said. “He was in debt, and he never got out. He borrowed money from Sal Cleveland, and when he couldn't pay it back, Sal started using the ranch. He kept barrels of liquor in the barn, and used the property to sell it. He used it for other things, too, whatever he wanted to hide.”
I thought about the photograph.
“Cleveland got the run of a secluded place, complete with outbuildings and a built-in night watchman in lieu of payment.”
“Yes,” she nodded. “When Sal got interested in something else on the ranch, and started spending most of his free time hanging around, there was nothing my dad could do about it.”
“What else was he interested in?”
She looked at me steadily. A wing of light hair hung across her eyes. Her skin was gold, and I wanted badly to kiss her, but I didn't.
“Me,” she said. “Sal Cleveland was interested in me. I was interested in him, too.”
I hadn't expected this.
“You were awfully young,” I said. “Fifteen?”
“I was seventeen when I started to be with him.”
She looked at me steadily, and it struck me again how dark her eyes were.
“He was young, too,” she said. “Older than me, but still young. My mother liked him.”
“And your father?”
“He didn't like it. Of course he didn't like it. Sal was a bad man, even as a boy.”
“So a creep, a bad guy starts to make time with his daughter, but he owes him money and has to put up with it,” I said. “That about it?”
“It wasn't just the money,” she said. “My father had his weaknesses, but he was never a coward. It was more than that. Sal had powers. He had spells. He's probably more powerful now.”
“Not the first time I've heard that. I still don't know what it means.”
“He can make people destroy themselves. If you cross him, he'll hurt you, or worse, make you hurt yourself. He knows some kind of black magic. He uses a deck of cards.”
“I don't much believe in black magic, Annie. So your father put up with it for a while, and then one day he changed his mind and sent you away?”
“Yes, exactly,” she said. “My father knew it would be dangerous, but he sent me away anyway. He sent me to live in New York with my mother's relatives. Sal became furious. He gave my dad a deadline to have me back at the ranch.”
A half-dozen crows fluttered in and wandered the deep shadows of my small front yard. They seemed to be looking for something. Every once in a while, one of them gave a small hop, as though startled.
“And your dad didn't do it,” I said. “He left you in New York.”
She nodded. She watched the crows intently.
“What made him finally decide to get you away from Cleveland? What made him stop accepting things as they were?”
She turned her head slowly and looked at me. Her eyes were strange, blank.
“Sal told my dad he planned to marry me,” she said. “He said I belonged to him. He said he loved me.”
I was a little bit surprised. I didn't think about guys like Sal Cleveland being in love. Maybe he had been different when he was younger; maybe he had still been a little bit human.
“How did you feel?” I asked. “How did you feel about him?”
She got quiet for so long I was sure she wouldn't answer, but she did. Her voice was hoarse. “I don't remember,” she said. “I know how I feel now.”
It was a little while before I realized she was crying again. Nothing made me as useless as a woman's tears, and I'd had my fill of them lately. “What's wrong, Annie?”
“I lied,” she said. “I don't lie, but I suppose I did. I don't know why they had to make me lie.”
“Lied about what?” I asked. “Who made you lie?”
At some point, I had gotten up from the porch floor and sat myself on the glider beside her. I put one arm across her shoulders, and af
ter a minute I gathered her in to me. She spoke against my chest.
“I don't lie,” she repeated. “Ever.”
“I know you don't, Annie. Tell me what it is that you want to clear up.”
“I didn't find June's body recently.”
“What was the lie?”
“I found her years ago, not long after she was killed. I snuck back here from time to time over the years. I was keeping her for myself. I always worried that someone else would find her, so I finally bought my house and moved back here, even though I knew it was dangerous and Sal would find out I came back to Santa Teresa.”
“You were keeping your sister's body?” I asked. “Keeping it for what?”
“She was so little. I had to take care of her. I held her hand and talked to her.”
I thought about the mummified little girl in the dark barn. She had been bones, skin and dried hair, held together by the rotted remains of a pink party dress. The woman I held had kept her company.
Annie was insane. I realized it now. I had met a lot of crazy people, and as a rule I didn't much mind them. Most had a natural honesty that so-called sane people didn't. I had never fallen in love with one, though, and I didn't know what the rules were.
“She was all I had,” Annie said. “Now they've taken her away.”
I wondered if loving a crazy person could make me crazy, too. I figured there were worse things.
“You didn't lie,” I said. “You're allowed to have secrets. Protecting a secret isn't the same as lying. Don't let anyone tell you it is.”
“So nothing will happen to Sal? He just gets away with it?”
“Not if I can help it, Annie.”
“She should have had her life.”
“I know.”
We didn't say anything else. We sat there for a long time and looked at the clean California twilight. Annie fell asleep. After a while, the strollers and the playing children and the dog-walkers all went inside and left us the empty sidewalk. The streetlights came on and then I fell asleep, too.
